December 2011
17 posts
2 tags
5 tags
“The reason the philosopher can be compared with the poet is that both are...”
– Thomas Aquinas in Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, quoted by Josef Pieper, who adds:
And because of their common power to disturb and transcend, all these basic behavioral patterns of the human being have a natural connection among themselves: the philosophical act, the religious act,...
3 tags
2 tags
“This is the problem: Many years ago I sat one day, in a sad enough mood, on the...”
– Franz Kafka in his diary, 1920, from Cosmopsis.
1 tag
4 tags
"The Power of the Powerless" →
My friend Stuart Carlton —who writes here and at Wings of Reason— took the time to clean up and post a copy of Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which is otherwise a bit hard to track down online.
Havel, who died on Sunday, was a surprisingly human figure for a man so heroic and transformative; he seemed, despite suffering imprisonment and terror after the...
5 tags
Consciousness, Interiority, AI
Perhaps there is a relationship between how interiority defines consciousness; how artificial intelligence has thus far failed to even approach consciousness and how it’s not even clear how it might; and how technologies that insist on the exteriorization of self reduce a sense of self.
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, 2009 (quoted by the...
2 tags
9 tags
“[We have forgotten] leisure as “non-activity” —an inner absence of...”
– Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 1948. This sort of leisure is the prey being hunted to extinction by technology in general and the Internet specifically, and it is this leisure which permits the creation of sustaining human meaning.
Leisure, Culture, Selfhood
Pieper’s thesis,...
2 tags
3 tags
“As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part...”
– T.S. Eliot, “Hysteria,” 1915.
3 tags
How to Listen to Jazz
Music’s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almost nothing of a song’s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music’s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into their sense of identity —they argue about these pseudo-tastes, fight about them, draw...
3 tags
2 tags
5 tags
3 tags
A Problem with Path
Path is an impossibly beautiful social-network and app for the iPhone and Android; it’s the sort of software one daydreams about creating, replete with delightful surprises and deeply-considered design. Quite apart from its many visual flourishes, some of its nicest touches reflect enormous amounts of cross-disciplinary work, too. Here’s an involved example:
When you begin using Path,...
2 tags
